I'm an Egomaniac with an Inferiority Complex

     I was musing/smiling about those song lyrics from the Steve Miller song "The Joker" that say "People keep talkin' 'bout me, baby..."  Also, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "The Breeze," ("Well, now, they call me the Breeze...").
     I was laughing inwardly (as opposed to "lol" or Laughing Out Loud), was because I was thinking of the one-liner my friend Scott gave me... "I used to worry about what other people thought of me, until I realized they don't."  I just thought, popular music is funny sometimes, and it's easier to get away with saying stupid shit than it is in real life.  Like, "People keep talkin' 'bout me, baby..."
     Really?  Does anyone, at any age, believe other people spend a lot of time thinking or talking about them? 
     I know, I know.  I'm probably making way too much of it, but isn't making way too much of not much kind of what blogging is all about?  Pretending like I have something new or important to say, when everyone knows there's nothing new under the sun.  A lot of re-packaged old stuff that seems new, but trust me, it's not.
     It's fun to think that someone else is going to notice the salsa spot half the size of a dime on my shirt sleeve, but no one will.  I'll change shirts in the belief that others are paying attention to me, but they're not.  They're thinking about whether or not they have any spots on their clothing.  At least in my culture that's how it goes.

Learning by Frustration

I like things.  I like things that work.

This is a side-door, sneaky, dishonest way of saying that I hate things that don't work.

I'll get right to the point.  This morning I'm frustrated (again) by computers, specifically the two ancient laptop/notebook/whatever computers I own.  We'll call one the Little White One and the other we'll call The Other One.  They're both PCs, not Macs.

I know the Little White One is about six years old.  I'm not sure how old The Other One is, but I know it's four or more years old, and that's why both of them are ancient.  Not old, ancient.  That's just the way it is in the tech world, right?

I like to wake up about 4:00 a.m., walk a mile, come home, build a fire in the fireplace, find my glasses, and sit down on the couch with a Thermos of coffee and a little white Styrofoam cup that I keep refilling.  I do this because that way I can drink an entire Thermos of coffee one tiny cup at a time and not feel like I had a big ol' cup of coffee.  But mainly I do it because I have a very difficult time finishing things I start (including cups of coffee) and that way, if my coffee sits too long and gets cold, I merely take the top off the Thermos, pour the tepid coffee back in, and voila!  A Thermos of coffee just a little less hot than it was before, but still hot.

Back to the point.  The Little White One connects to our wireless internet connection, but it's really slow.  So all the stuff I said about wanting to be patient, well, I really don't want to be patient when it comes to computers.  I want them to work and I want them to work right now.

The Other One connects to the internet sometimes and sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why.  I do know that it frustrates the hell out of me because I get caught up in this vortex of trying to fix the connection, with just enough little pop-up messages to give me hope, and end up spending an hour or more accomplishing nothing.  Nothing except changing my mood from serene to frustrated and angry.


I have no more time to complain about this this morning, so I'm going to work.  


God bless the slow Little White One.

Survival

Okay, so I over-edit when I write and can't seem to get anything posted or published or whatever it's called.

I know one thing, these sites with tabs and drop-down menus and drill-down lists of endless choices all arranged neatly and logically, could not have been created by a brain like mine in less time than it would take a room full of monkeys with laptop computers to type the complete works of Shakespeare.


I now have 14 minutes before I need to start the process of getting out the door to work.  Make that 13 minutes.


I'm surviving today, like I did yesterday and, if it's meant to be, like I will tomorrow.  So are you.  Whatever you're doing, whatever you've done, whatever you will do, you do as part of the way you survive.  It works for you.  When it stops working, you'll stop doing it and try something else.  It may take a while, it may even take years, but if you like being alive enough, you will eventually adapt your behavior in order to survive.


Living is surviving, but not the other way around.  I've seen the sun come up and go down a few times and I've survived 53 summers in the Sonoran Desert.  I don't know much about living, but I know a little about surviving.


I now have two minutes before I need to put my lunch in my bag and go do what I've done for most of the past 35 years - show up to survive.